Particle Fever

"Particle Fever" is a gripping documentary about the most exacting and expensive scientific experiment ever conducted, and one that may be among the most significant. The film charts a 2012 milestone in the decades-long search by physicists to find an elementary particle called the Higgs boson. If the discovery is confirmed, it brings them a large step closer to understanding the universe at its most fundamental level.

This abstruse stuff can be absorbed by nonspecialists only in the most general way. However, the movie does a fine job not only of making us understand what's at stake, but letting us share in the scientists' giddy excitement and goggle at the strange and beautiful tools they used.

The film personalizes the quest by introducing us to a half-dozen physicists who had varying degrees of participation in the grand experiment, conducted at the CERN lab in Switzerland. Among them are David Kaplan, an affable physicist at Johns Hopkins and the film's producer; Monica Dunford, a post-doc fond of jogging who has a talent for translating scientific complexities into layman's language; and Fabiola Gianotti, an Italian physicist and classically trained pianist who coordinated the massive effort.

They are part of an army of 10,000 scientists from around the world who used a spectacular device called the Large Hadron Collider - the largest machine ever built, a 17-mile ring of superconducting magnets - to crash particles into each other at unbelievable speeds.

After a number of anxiety-inducing mishaps and delays, and under intense media scrutiny, the physicists finally produced a particle that seemed to match theoretical predictions of the Higgs boson. Time to break out the Champagne - although the film does end on a slightly deflating note that "more research is needed." The results, however important, don't quite signal what Kaplan calls "the end of physics."

But the experiment was important enough to prompt Stephen Hawking to suggest a Nobel Prize for Peter Higgs, the British physicist who first speculated in 1964 about the particle that bears his name. (In 2013, Higgs did win the Nobel Prize in physics, shared with François Englert.)

One of the film's most touching moments is the appearance of the venerable Higgs, moved to tears by the findings (and acclaim) of the CERN scientists.

Director Mark A. Levinson (also a theoretical physicist), aided by editing from the redoubtable Walter Murch, has made a handsome and even suspenseful movie that never talks down to us about its staggeringly complex subject. Even if you can't explain the Standard Model or define "supersymmetry," you'll walk away with a conviction that you've vicariously participated in a historic event.